Operation Sierra-75 Read online

  DEATH OVER HIS SHOULDER

  Decker took three more swallows before returning the canteen to the carrier. With a satisfied sigh, he reached down to retrieve his Pitbull. The weapon was gone. He knelt down, searching the dusty bottom of the shallow foxhole with his starlight viewer. The assault rifle was nowhere to be found.

  A strange sensation prickled along the back of Decker’s neck. Fear gripped his belly. Slowly he turned his head. There, perched on the rim of the foxhole, was a Masher. The thing squatting above him had a filthy hide that bore many scars. An arching row of bolt heads followed the line of the creature’s ridged eyebrows, looking like a rounded M of metallic warpaint across its forehead. Even more horrible than the monster’s disfigurement was the fact that it held Decker’s Pitbull in its massive hands . . .

  VOR: THE MAELSTROM

  Vor: Into the Maelstrom

  by Loren L. Coleman

  Vor: The Playback War

  by Lisa Smedman

  Vor: Island of Power

  by Dean Wesley Smith

  Vor: The Rescue

  by Don Ellis

  Vor: Hell Heart

  by Robert E. Vardeman

  Available from Warner Aspect®

  VOR : OPERATION SIERRA - 75 . Copyright © 2001 by FASA Corporation. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  For information address Warner Books, Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017.

  VOR: The Maelstrom and all related characters, slogans, and indicia are trademarks of FASA Corporation.

  Aspect® name and logo are registered trademarks of Warner Books, Inc.

  A Time Warner Company

  The “Warner Books” name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2214-5

  A mass market edition of this book was published in 2001 by Warner Books.

  First eBook Edition: January 2001

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  For my parents, Thomas B. and Mildred S. Gressman.

  I guess you raised me right after all.

  Thanks once again to all those who have contributed their time, encouragement, and expertise to the creation of this story. Particular thanks to Donna Ippolito, Jaime Levine, and Wyn Hilty, for their support, guidance, and useful suggestions. I extend my gratitude to those experts who have lent me their aid, and a special thank-you to Bill Kyle, who gave me a bit of insight into the mind of a Marine. Any errors in these pages are mine, alone.

  Once again, thanks to Brenda for putting up with me as I labored over this book.

  And as always, my thanks to You, Lord, for the abilities you’ve given me, and the opportunity to exercise them once again.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  About the Author

  Prologue

  * * *

  “M ission Control, this is Cabot. We have established standard orbit at Sierra Seven-Five, and are beginning preliminary survey.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Julian LaVree’s voice crackled from the overhead speakers, echoing in the hard-walled Mission Control Center. The chamber was one of the largest in the Union’s Tycho Crater Moonbase. Communication, telemetry monitoring, and long-range scanner terminals stood in ordered ranks, occupying much of the room’s floor space. One wall was taken up by larger, flat-screen monitors.

  “Roger, Cabot,” senior controller Adam Paige responded. “Mission Control awaits your feeds.”

  Paige logged in Cabot’s message, glancing at the largest of the wall-mounted monitors. In the center right of the display, a yellow cursor marked the position of the mission currently under way. The cursor, in the shape of a tiny spaceship, held position over a near-Earth body designated Sierra Seven-Five. In the lower right-hand corner of the display was the mission clock. Bold white characters proclaimed the time and date, 08:38 A . M . 27 March 2114.

  No one knew the origins of that planet. That was at least part of the reason Cabot had been sent out across the uncertain reaches of the Outer Ring to investigate the seemingly dead world. Unmanned probes suggested that several man-made structures existed on that world, many of them still intact. The lack of major power sources indicated that the beings who had raised these buildings had either died out, or fled their world. In either case, Sierra Seven-Five was yet another victim of the Maelstrom.

  The Maelstrom. The word caused a qualm of uneasiness in Paige. No one knew exactly what or even where the Maelstrom was. All that was known for certain was that it was an immeasurably vast area of time and space into which Earth and the moon had been dragged. During the chaos that accompanied Earth’s “Induction” into the Maelstrom, as scientists were calling it, incredible “Earth Changes” occurred. Radical shifts in planetary weather patterns led to massive storms. Seismic tremors shook nearly every area of the planet, some laying waste to entire regions. The island nation of Japan was one area to suffer such massive devastation. Alien plants, fungi, and animal life began to appear in those places. Some of these were benign, some hostile. All were frightening. There had been reports of alien creatures actually invading the planet. Many of the surviving humans had put these rumors down to panic and to an increased level of hostility between the Neo-Soviet Empire and the North American Union. In the wake of the Induction, first skirmishes, and then outright battles had been fought between the old enemies, culminating in a limited exchange of nuclear weapons. There were still the occasional scraps between east and west, but things seemed to have settled down for now.

  In all the terror and chaos of the Induction, little had been discovered about Terra’s new and frightening neighborhood. It had been eight years since the Induction. Now the Union Space Corps was seeking to make up for that failure. It was known that the Maelstrom seemed to be a huge vortex, a pocket universe existing in some other dimension than the one it had been ripped out of. Earth occupied the outermost ring of the Maelstrom, far away from the huge blank disk of the Maw, a writhing, tentacled ball of energy that lay at the center of the Maelstrom. Other planets in the Outer Ring were close enough to be investigated by long-range probes. Sierra Seven-Five was one such world. The fact that the probe detected structures but no signs of life suggested several possibilities. Perhaps the entire population of the planet had died before, during, or after Sierra Seven-Five’s Induction, or they had been wiped out by one of the alien races inhabiting the Maelstrom, or they might have found a way to escape through the Veil, the dark, shifting curtain that surrounded the Maelstrom. Survival and escape were the two highest priorities on everyone’s minds.

  While Paige mused on these unsettling thoughts, Lieutenant Colonel LaVree’s voice sounded from the control room’s speakers once a
gain.

  “Cabot to Mission Control, beginning first sensor sweep. Preliminary scans indicate a toxic atmosphere with high concentrations of ammonia and carbon dioxide. Pressure seems to be about the same as Earth. Indications of large bodies of wat—”

  A burst of loud static blasted from the speakers, ending abruptly. Then there was silence.

  Paige sat upright in his chair.

  “Cabot, this is Mission Control, say again your last.” Paige knew it would take over forty-five minutes for a reply from the survey ship to reach Mission Control. He keyed a command into his computer terminal, calling up the vessel’s telemetry feeds. All of the indicators that were relayed back to the control center from Cabot’s sensor suite were blank.

  “Telemetry, run a diagnostic,” Paige barked.

  “Already doing it, boss,” a technician responded. “We got nothing. No telemetry, no carrier signal, no nothing. Cabot is completely off-line.”

  “Dammit,” Paige cursed. “All right, keep trying to reestablish contact. Let me know the second you get anything. I’ve gotta call the Director.”

  The senior controller swore again as he reached for the comm-set. In a few moments, a link was established between the lunar control center and the Johnson Space Center on Earth.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, sir,” Paige said, as the Director of the Union Space Agency answered. A glance at his console clock revealed it was three in the morning in Texas. “We have a problem. Cabot has gone off-line. We’re trying to reestablish contact, but I’m afraid she may be down.”

  1

  * * *

  “C ome in, Captain Taggart. Please sit down.” General Keith Andrews gestured at a vacant chair.

  “Yessir,” Captain Maxwell Taggart responded. A slight turn of his head and a barely perceptible flicker of his eyes directed the tall, ruddy-skinned woman who had entered the room with him to take up a position behind the officer’s chair.

  Taggart was not what most people would refer to as a handsome man. Standing just over 180 centimeters tall, he was strongly built, with unremarkable brown eyes and equally unremarkable brown hair, worn “high-and-tight” according to UAF regulations. It was the uniform that marked him as a special individual. A gold globe-and-anchor device graced the collar of his drab green dress uniform, balanced by the paired silver bars of a captain. A gold dragon coiled against a scarlet shield graced the shoulder of his drab green uniform jacket. Together the insignia proclaimed him to be an officer of the Third Amphibious Marine Division, the first unit specially trained for spaceborne operations. Officially, Taggart’s unit was considered to be a Special Forces platoon in the Union Armed Forces Ground Corps, though their cross training could easily relegate them to the Space Corps as well. Like most of his brothers-in-arms, Taggart considered himself a Marine, even though the old United States Marine Corps had technically been absorbed into the UAF G-Forces. The pride and esprit de corps of the Marines was evident in the officer’s stance and bearing.

  The woman who followed him into the room also wore the insignia of the Third Division, but her uniform bore no officers’ bars. In their place were the stripes and crossed rifles of a gunnery sergeant. Again, though the rank of gunnery sergeant technically no longer existed, those of the old Marine Corps were reluctant to give up any of their traditions, or their identity as one of the oldest, and most elite, fighting forces in the UAF.

  Taggart dropped easily into the chair Andrews had indicated and placed a small notebook computer on the table. As he waited for Andrews to begin, Taggart glanced around the room. The briefing room, like many of the spaces in the Union’s lunar base at Tycho, was small almost to the point of being cramped. Besides the general, there were two others present, a young man wearing the collar flashes of the Union Technical Corps and a dark-haired woman clad in the white dress uniform of the Union Space Corps.

  “Two days ago,” General Andrews said, “The USS Cabot, an Explorer class survey ship, settled into a standard orbit above the near-Earth planet Sierra Seven-Five. Her mission was to investigate that planet, based upon sensor imagery sent back by an H-25-type unmanned probe.”

  As the general spoke, a chart flashed across a screen set into the briefing room’s back wall. Taggart was familiar with the chart. It was the best computer-generated representation of the Maelstrom that the Union’s limited sensor, probe, and survey efforts could produce. Only the “near-Earth” area of the Outer Ring was represented in detail. Only a few features, such as the anomalies called the Tangle and the Near Maw Manifestation, were visible in the Central and Inner Rings. The large blank, or sparsely marked, sections of the chart reminded Taggart of the old mariners’ charts of Earth, drawn up during the Age of Exploration. Only in this case, the featureless sections of the map before him were missing the inscription “Here there be Monsters.”

  “The mission controllers tried to reestablish contact with Cabot for several hours. Eventually they gave up,” the general continued. “Virtually anything could have happened to her. She may have met with some form of accident, she may have been pulled into the Maw. Intelligence reports suggest that the Neo-Soviet Empire has increased its space-exploration efforts. It is possible that Cabot may have run into a Neo-Sov mission and been shot down.”

  Andrews paused briefly, as though reluctant to speak the words that were coming next.

  “Cabot may have been attacked and destroyed by one of the alien races inhabiting the Maelstrom.”

  Taggart jerked his eyes up from his notebook computer to stare in shock at the general.

  “Excuse me, sir, but you did just say ‘alien races,’ didn’t you?”

  “That’s right, Captain,” Andrews said, his voice flat. “Alien races, plural. We’ve been keeping this information secret. The people of Earth have been through enough in the past eight years, without the added stressor of learning that there are powerful, sometimes hostile, races out there.

  “We’ve included a précis on each of the races we’ve encountered so far in your briefing material. Distribute that material to your crew only after you’ve launched. None of this can be allowed to leak out, Captain. I’m afraid, after this mission, you and your entire unit will fall under the Official Secrets Act.”

  Taggart nodded silently, wanting the general to get on with the briefing. Once again, his perception of reality had been turned inside out. The normalcy of listening to a commander outlining an upcoming mission provided him with a touchstone of reality in the lunatic world of the Maelstrom. As Andrews returned to his theme, Taggart spared Onawa Frost a quick glance. The Mohawk gunnery sergeant stood impassively, her hands clasped behind her. Frost’s unflappable nature was a second valuable touchstone to the Marine officer.

  “Unable to reestablish contact with Cabot,” Andrews continued. “And lacking any scanners sensitive enough at long range to detect anything so small as a survey ship, they were forced to give her up as lost.

  “Then, less than a day after Cabot was listed as ‘presumed lost,’ this came through on her regular communication channel.”

  The general stopped and gestured to a civilian technician seated at a computer terminal in the corner of the room. The tech entered a command on his machine and a hissing crackle filled the room. Almost buried in the clutter of cosmic noise, was a brief, garbled message.

  “. . . ission Control . . . s Cabot. We’re down. I say ag . . . bot is down on Sierra Seven-Five. Coordinates . . . east. Can’t last long. They . . . ight come again. For God’s sake hurry!”

  Despite being broken by the crack and hiss of static, there was a clear note of rising fear in the speaker’s voice.

  “That, Captain,” General Andrews resumed once the recording ran out, “was the voice of Cabot’s third officer, Ensign Walter Michelli. His profile says he is a good, steady officer, cool under fire as they say. In spite of that assessment, you can plainly tell the man is on the ragged edge of panic.

  “We’ve played that message, and the records of the ship’s
last telemetry readings, backward and forward and we still have no idea what brought Cabot down. What we do know is that there is at least one of her crew still alive. You, Captain, are to take your platoon to Sierra Seven-Five and pull him out.”

  “Begging the general’s pardon,” Taggart said in a pleasant baritone. “Why us? We’re combat Marines, not a rescue team.”

  “Precisely, Captain. We don’t know what happened to the ship. She may have suffered an accident, but then again, she may have been shot down either by the Neo-Soviets or by some of the aliens. In any case, I really don’t want to send an unarmed rescue team and have them run afoul of the same bad guys who brought Cabot down. Your platoon will be providing cover for the rescuers.”

  Andrews gestured to the female Space Corps officer, who until that time had been sitting quietly at the general’s right, tapping notes into her own palm-top.

  “Captain, this is Dr. Lieutenant Rebecca Cortez, of the Mexican Contribution Force. She is a trauma surgeon, specializing in space-related injuries. She will be leading the rescue team.”

  Cortez rose slightly from her chair and greeted Taggart, a courtesy he returned, albeit somewhat stiffly.

  “General, I have a question,” Taggart said quietly, the stiff formality still in his voice. “As Dr. Cortez is an S-Corps lieutenant, that puts us equal in rank. Who will have overall command of this operation?”

  “Since it is a rescue mission, I had assumed I would.” Cortez spoke before the general could reply.

  “I might be inclined to agree with you, Doctor,” Taggart shot back, stressing her civilian title, rather than her military rank, “if you had any experience at leading troops in the field. But you don’t, do you? You’re a medic, not a professional soldier.”

  Unlike many officers in the Union Armed Forces, Maxwell Taggart had no preconceived hatred or distrust of the Mexican Contribution Forces. Rather, his crustiness came from a strong concern for his men. As a professional soldier, he was loath to turn command of his platoon over to another officer, especially if that officer was a doctor who was what he viewed as essentially a civilian dressed up as a soldier.